Senate to Hold Hearing on Security of Voting Machines
In the wake of the California report
released last week showing that Red Team security researchers were able
to hack voting machines from three of the top voting machine companies,
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) announced today that the Senate
Rules and Administration Committee will hold a hearing in September to
examine the report’s findings. From the press release:
“I was very surprised to read how easily these machines could be
hacked into and election results distorted,” Senator Feinstein
said. “This report demonstrates the precarious risk of relying on
electronic voting machines, especially when a verified paper record is
not provided. These findings are yet another reason that states and
counties should consider a move to optical scan machines that provide
an auditable, individual voter-verified paper record without having to
rely on a separate printer.”
One wonders where the senator has been the last four years
that she’s surprised by the findings revealed in the report. Feinstein
introduced a bill earlier this year that would require voting machines
nationwide to produce a paper trail, but the bill has received little
support in the Senate thus far.
Another bill that Congressman Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) introduced in
the House years ago (and reintroduced this year) is making better
progress, though its path has hardly been smooth. As I reported two weeks ago,
the bill almost died due to arguments among interest groups over
sections of the bill dealing with the paper trail mandate and voter
accessibility. A compromise was apparently reached this week (see the draft version
that’s been circulating on the internet), but voting activists are
steaming mad with it since it would allow touch-screen machines with
add-on printers to continue to be used. The machines use thermal paper,
such as the kind used in cash registers.
Voting activist groups fought hard to get those printers in place in 2003 and 2004 and were the impetus
for the original Holt bill back in 2003 which would have mandated that
printers be installed on all touch-screen machines. But the activists
have since changed their minds and now want touch-screen machines
outlawed entirely and replaced with optical-scan machines that use a
durable full-size paper ballot. The revised bill introduced this year
initially seemed to suggest that touch-screen machines would be
outlawed, but that wording in the bill has since changed to permit
counties to use the touch-screen machines with printers.
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